First, be. Secondly, love. Finally, worship. … These, you must understand, are three linked steps in life’s upward progress.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I am a child of God, and Jesus loves me. Sometimes we need to speak softly, sweetly, and simply to ourselves in order to be strong. I’ve prayed to be freed of cortisol, and I’m pretty sure this one will go unanswered considering it’s a life-saving stress hormone. My counterclaim to Abba is that I don’t live in a forest, and for a sensitive person in a fast and furious culture subtleties sound like tigers crouching through the bushes of an urban jungle. Most days are a miracle, and I keep praying. Perhaps the wiser prayer is to transform cortisol into something else. Compassion is more useful, and less likely to leave us with sore obliques.
The breaking point of brokenness is seeing that we can no longer hold the pieces together ourselves. Hiding behind the polish is exhausting, and keeping it all together requires a tenderness and supernatural strength that do not come from grit alone, but from inviting in something more and allowing the belief in all the good that’s possible, that we so readily perceive in others, to trickle down into our shards and sharp edges.
What if we grow from having resilience to being resilient when we can let things fall apart because we trust in God, the spirit that restores and makes all things new. Depending on faith and deciding to live by it grants us guides and graces through the process of redefining storylines into mere facts and details. We learn as we unlearn the wisdom of the world and immerse in knowledge of its Creator who plots redemption not catastrophe.
We find strands of hope, patterns of promise more easily when we just take Jesus at His word.
“And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”
Even if it’s hyperbole, the meaning is true. God is Creator of Heaven and Earth and everything in them. The Master Builder has a plan and purpose for each of us, our whole selves and all their jagged intersections; no detail is accidental in a vision that is always becoming. He made us to delight in us, as we discover our unique expression of love in the world.
Believing this changes things because it changes us and how we show up in a world full of prowling tigers. The tigers are real, that’s undeniable, but so is God’s desire for my life. Why not focus more on who we’re meant to be? And if we’re made by Love, then we can love.
Freely received and freely given seems so much simpler than keeping score. Can it be so simple? That in being children of God, and loving as we are loved, we are seeking and finding the latent potential of individuality deep in our soul God dreamed from the beginning. Isn’t that the real tiger we need to awaken? The energy to transform and pour out in a life beautiful before God. Which might as well be worship.
What am I missing?
